I'm wondering what the difference is with the
Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Gaming 5? Just trying to understand motherboard-choosing-logic.
The specs look very similar. I don't see any differences that would matter. I'm not sure that they make the Gaming 5 anymore. At any rate, there aren't any new units for sale on newegg. I chose the Z370 Aorus Ultra Gaming WIFI because it has the feature set I need (2x M.2 slots, 2x PCIE 3.0 slots), was in stock at the microcenter near me, and is one of the boards that has been tested here. You get a $30 rebate at microcenter when you buy both the CPU and motherboard there, so I got the Aorus Ultra Gaming WIFI for $128 (including the extended warranty) which is a great price for that board. The CPU prices at microcenter are always the lowest anyway, for what they have in-store. I have learned to not skimp on the motherboard as I have always had better long term luck with boards in the $130-$180 range than with lower priced boards. I have never got an extreme board in the $300+ range, except for servers.
Does fan control not work on a hackintosh? (Never build a PC before, let alone a hackintosh and most guides don't mention this afaik)
A fan controller just sits between the power supply and the fans and lets you manually adjust the fan speeds for you case fans. It has nothing to do with the operating system.
The specific fan controller that I got is a bit different. This controller reads the voltage from the PWM pin on the motherboard CPU cooling fan header and then adjusts all of the case fans based on that input. If you have "Smart Fan Control" (or something like that) enabled in the bios, the motherboard reads the CPU temperature and increases the fan speed as the CPU temperature increases. This is a motherboard bios function and I think it should work regardless of the operating system.
There are also OS specific applications that can be used to additionally adjust this. Gigabyte has their "Easy Tune 6" software that has a very nice interface to adjust the fan speeds based on the CPU temp. I don't know if there is anything comparable that will run in Mac OS. It seems unlikely since the Mac form factor doesn't have case fans. Perhaps there is a third party app that is available but I don't know.
You can always use a simple fan controller to manually adjust the speeds regardless of what OS is running.
LMHmedchem
